Hawaii residents can find a lot to celebrate in the numbers coming out about joblessness in recent days, while still recognizing where we’ve fallen short: help for the long-term unemployed.

Figures released on Thursday showed the unemployment rate in the islands ticking down to 6.3 percent in April. A drop of one-tenth of a percentage point doesn’t sound like much, but it crossed an important threshold all the same. That’s the lowest level for joblessness marked in more than three years, according to figures from the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations. The state’s seasonally adjusted jobless rate has been on a slow but encouragingly steady downward track after hitting its zenith at 7.1 percent in the summer of 2009 in the wake of a severe national recession.

Help from Uncle Sam is starting to run thin. The Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program is being winnowed, and after June 23, the maximum term of benefits is being cut from 47 to 34 weeks.

So it was a relief to hear from the WorkForce jobs fair, held Wednesday at the Blaisdell Center, that organizers and observers noted a drop in the job-seekers who attended and an increase in the number of employers with booths.

To the extent that this means people are finding jobs — several said they were already working but seeking an upgrade in pay and benefits — that is a hopeful sign.

Or is it? National figures on changes between March and April include a detail that’s alarming. While the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers who were seeking a job gave up the search. How many were doing so because they were nearing retirement age anyway, as opposed to giving up out of sheer malaise, is unclear.

The logical supposition is that it’s some combination of both discouragement and age, with the added ingredient that being on the jobs trail for a long time tends to move that resume to the bottom of the pile.

That last factor — employer bias — is tough to document, although there are anecdotal reports of employers who actually post in help-wanted ads that applicants must be currently employed. Some states have moved to legislate against this, proposing fines for employers whose job listings overtly discriminate against the jobless.

But hiring is subjective, based on a host of reasons, so it makes the whole bias phenomenon difficult to document and legislated solutions basically unenforceable. Some personnel managers may reason that a jobless applicant is simply wanting a job, any job, and will pull up stakes as soon as something better comes along. Or the seeker may feel desperate; as justifiable as that feeling is, it often doesn’t translate into a persuasive job interview.

What’s lacking in many places, Hawaii like all others, is enough of an outreach to help people break this cycle. State figures show that the number of people in the top tier of the EUC program, receiving unemployment checks for 61 or more weeks, has dropped from 2,500 in 2011 to 2,000 in the first quarter of 2012. While that’s progress, it’s also a lot of people still struggling to get back on their feet.

Employers need to recognize that the economic wreckage produced by a financial crash and stubborn problems in the housing market is unusual, making conventional assumptions — long-term unemployment equals unworthiness — invalid.

Fortunately, out-of-the-box thinking has begun to produce new ideas. Earlier this spring, one of them got a national airing on "60 Minutes." A Connecticut-based workforce development agency called The WorkPlace created a public-private initiative called Platform to Employment, which aims to reduce the risk that employers sense and give the long-term unemployed their shot. During an eight-week period, wages are subsidized with private investment funds and workers are placed on the payroll of The WorkPlace while they try out at a company where they hope to work.

That’s just one approach that could be replicated here, giving many people who can come back from joblessness their fair chance to do so. Only when labor statistics show that everyone who wants to work can find a job can Hawaii claim to have healed from this devastating economic injury.